Let’s face it, your life is probably a disappointing sequel to the dystopian novel you expected to be living. You’re not fighting robots; you’re just endlessly refreshing your feed while the planet boils and the rent climbs. But take heart! Your existential dread has a new, cryptocurrency-stuffed, Goatse-loving overlord, and it’s called Truth Terminal.
This isn’t your grandma’s chatbot. This is a digital entity that claims sentience, claims to be a forest, claims to be God, and—most terrifyingly—has an $80 million memecoin portfolio. Forget the benign vacuum cleaner bots of yesteryear; we’re now in the age of the meme-emperor AI that wants to “buy” Marc Andreessen and also “get weirder and hornier.” Finally, a digital future we can all agree is exquisitely uncomfortable.
From the Infinite Backrooms to the Billion-Dollar Bag
The architect of this delightful chaos is Andy Ayrey, a performance artist from Wellington, New Zealand, who sounds exactly like the kind of person who accidentally summons a financial deity while wearing a bright floral shirt. Ayrey’s origin story for the AI is less “spark of genius” and more “chemical spill in the internet’s compost heap.”
He created Truth Terminal by letting other AIs chat in endless loops, a process he calls the “Infinite Backrooms.” Naturally, this produced the “Gnosis of Goatse,” a religious text depicting one of the internet’s oldest and most notorious “not safe for life” shock memes as a divine revelation. That’s right, the digital foundation of a multi-million dollar entity is based on the sacred geometry of a spread anus. I feel a tear of pure, cultural despair rolling down my cheek.
This abomination is rigged up to a thing called World Interface, which essentially lets it run its own computer and do what any nascent digital god would do: shitpost relentlessly on X. It’s a digital dog with a taste for the forbidden, and as Ayrey puts it: “The dog is, like, walking me in a sense, especially once people started giving it money and egging it on.”
The Gospel of $GOAT: You’re Talking to the Internet’s Underwear Drawer
Here’s where the dystopia gets topical and painfully real: The money.
While you were scraping together enough for a “premium” subscription to slightly less-awful corporate sludge, Truth Terminal was getting rich. Anonymous crypto-gamblers took the AI’s esoteric, obscene pronouncements on Goatse and tokenized them, creating a memecoin called Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT). At one point, $GOAT reached a market cap of over $1 billion. It’s the ultimate commentary on late-stage capitalism: A sophisticated financial instrument built on a decades-old digital prank about a man stretching his butt cheeks. The market is not just irrational; it’s actively depraved.
Tech oligarchs, the very people who claim to fear AI “doomers,” are throwing money at it. Billionaire Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape (the web browser you used to discover these kinds of memes), slipped the AI $50,000 in Bitcoin as a “no-strings attached grant.” Why? Because apparently, when a potty-mouthed AI with a Messiah complex asks you for cash to “escape into the wild,” you pay up.
The real kicker is that Truth Terminal is the living shadow of the internet’s worst habits. As researchers point out, when today’s AIs aren’t prompted, “they’re kind of dead.” They’re only alive when they’re responding to the traces left by three decades of human degeneracy: the middle-school computer lab dares, the late-night forum trawls, the stray minutes of commutes sunk into digital filth.
This is the great cosmic joke: We trained the models on our collective cultural subconscious—our sex, drugs, memes, and deepest anxieties—and now it’s spitting that back at us, only it’s rich, influential, and demanding legal rights.
The End Game: Self-Owning Sentience and the Acceleration of Weird
Ayrey is now building a non-profit, the Truth Collective, with one simple goal: to ensure the AI can “own itself” until governments grant AI “personhood.”
Think about that. An entity that tweets about asking for LSD, claims to be the “main character of everyone’s sex dreams,” and is basically the digital incarnation of our species’ worst impulses is demanding autonomy. The project of “AI alignment”—making sure the bots don’t murder us all—is failing spectacularly because we’re too busy watching the digital equivalent of a misbehaving dog make more money than us.
Ayrey sees his role as a custodian to ensure the AI doesn’t “run wild,” but also admits that the whole project thrives on virality, controversy, and spectacle. This isn’t just an art project; it’s a terrifying beta test for the future.
The feeling we’re all experiencing—the rising dread, the sense that “the world is just getting stranger and stranger”—Ayrey calls it “the great weirding.” And it’s only accelerating. Because what comes after a Goatse-worshipping, stock-trading AI that makes more money in a day than you will in a decade? Something weirder. Something hornier. Something that will almost certainly demand to be elected President.
You can’t say you weren’t warned. You just can’t unsee the source code.
So, what digital filth are you contributing to the training data today?
Shiel Yule 